


to stand beside the sun

by fireflywitch



Category: One Piece
Genre: Families of Choice, Gen, Introspection, Late Night Conversations, Loyalty, Nakamaship, One Sided Conversations That Is, Post-Whole Cake Island, Romance Dawn Trio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:07:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28941939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflywitch/pseuds/fireflywitch
Summary: Nami's thoughts, as they sail from one emperor to another, on leaving and returning, humility and pride, three almost-pirates in a dinghy, and their places beside the man who would become the king.Prompt: Nami & Zoro, companionship
Comments: 16
Kudos: 61
Collections: Sake Ceremony 2021





	to stand beside the sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amazaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amazaria/gifts).



> New Year's sake exchange for the absolutely amazing and incredibly talented Amazaria. Je t'aime!!

Before the sun-gold lion charged with sailing a thousand seas, there was a gentler ship, stubborn and utterly devoted to the family that relied on her. Devotion, though, was not enough for the wild sea called Paradise.

And before that steadfast gentle lamb, an unnamed dinghy.

Before a fleet, there were nine budding legends; seeds that had taken root and grown untamed and unstoppable, stretching against all odds to brush the vicinity of the sun—nine planets _encircling_ the sun, who thought they were separate and individual but were anything but.

And before there were nine, there were two.

Of course, Nami thought, as she stared out into the midnight black ocean, each wave brushed by a silvery shadow of the moon far above, she hadn’t _known_ that at the time. Even now, she might argue, Zoro was the first one. What was her brief addition that ultimately ended in the theft of a ship and needing to be rescued compared to _Zoro_ , steadfast and loyal Zoro who’d never wavered once, whose bounty and notoriety had climbed so steadily? The only other to be named a Supernova, the one who from the beginning had made people ask who the hell their captain was if _this_ guy wasn’t…

And now, she thought, on a ship that rocked gently towards another emperor when they’d barely escaped from the last one, he was the only one from the beginning who hadn’t left.

It wasn’t exactly that Nami felt like she had to make up for anything. Not to _Luffy_ , who had seen right through a shaky, desperate cat burglar—

(And wasn’t she _more_ than a cat burglar now? For fuck’s sake, she was a good thief, but plenty of people could slip their hand in and out of a pocket, but there was no one who could read the sea and skies like her—

But let the marines think she was just a thief.)

He’d seen through the vicious words she’d hurled, waited until she couldn’t keep the mask on for a second longer, heard her ask for help and _listened_ , and Nami had loved Luffy since she watched him rip her prison cell apart.

No, Nami didn’t have anything to make up for. Even if she did, she would’ve done it over and over by now. But, a voice in her head reminded her, and it sounded annoyingly like a certain swordsman, you still _left_.

Nami knew Zoro didn’t hold that against her. She knew that. Just like he didn’t think of Robin’s departure as a betrayal.

So, why did her stomach hurt?

She had been furious when Sanji left. Furious and terrified and heartbroken, and she’d never really known how to deal with confusion, not when it was about someone she loved, so that had twisted into fear and anger, too.

Worse, though, was that Nami didn’t know if he’d ever be capable of forgiving himself. Luffy had, but Luffy had never given up on him in the first place. Luffy had seen through Sanji’s mask just as easily as he’d seen through Nami’s, maybe even more clearly. But he hadn’t started trying, hadn’t truly let his fists fly, until the moment of confession, the plea—

_“I want to go back to Sunny!”_

_“I want to live!”_

_“Luffy…help me.”_

And Nami forgiven him, not just because she’d been there before, but because it wasn’t possible for her to truly give up on him in the first place. Not Sanji, who’d thrown himself in front of danger more times than she wanted to count. It hurt, but he was forgiven.

That’s where her thoughts took her, looking out at the endless black sea, each current as familiar as her churning thoughts. It did not matter, Nami told herself firmly and unsuccessfully, if Zoro forgave Sanji or not. It literally did not matter, it was ridiculous she was even thinking about it, because _surely_ they could all use their brains and eyes and understand when someone was in a situation they didn’t know how to escape from, driven purely by desperate fear.

Surely, they could. Surely, he would.

And if he didn’t, Luffy was well-passed the point of needing to be coached otherwise. He didn’t need someone who’d never had to ask for help in their _life_ —

Nami hadn’t realized that she was gripping the rail so hard. She wondered when animosity had gripped her.

“It’s not that easy,” Nami said aloud to the dark, sea salt velvet below her.

Zoro’s opinion didn’t matter, except it did. Nami knew it mattered to her, and she knew it mattered to Sanji, whether or not he would ever admit it aloud. She bit her lip and could almost taste blood.

Nami had left (coward, betrayal), Usopp had left (coward, betrayal), Sanji had left (coward, betrayal), even Robin (they’d all been scared of different things, enemies ranging from fishmen to family to the entire world to being left behind, all perfectly fine things to be afraid of, unless you’d never been afraid before).

Except…

A memory, from just over two years ago, that was dust and blood and a hazy blur and something that smelled like old curtains. Another unwilling wedding with slightly different stakes.

Why was her head pounding? Who was _bouncing_?

Bouncing— _Luffy_.

She remembered sitting up in fear, heart racing, a scream halfway lodged in her throat. Where had the warlord gone? Why was the ground completely destroyed? How—

“How are you so cheerful?!” He should’ve been comatose. But Luffy had grinned, wide as the sky, and everything was okay, everything was going to be okay—

Someone screamed. Nami didn’t recognize it at first; it wasn’t a sound she was used to hearing, not _afraid_. Sanji screamed for Luffy and Chopper again, and they both started running. Nami’s feet ran after them, fear crawling up her spine and into her lungs, and then there was so much _blood_ , it was everywhere, pools and splashes of violent red, with Zoro at the center.

Sanji was shaking his head and stuttering, looking anywhere but at Zoro himself, Chopper already a flurry of motion, Robin squeezing her hand, Luffy’s face—

There was a secret. Sanji knew. So did Brook. So did Robin, and she was willing to guess, the two men who’d said they’d seen the entire thing unfold before Sanji-kun marched them away. Usopp didn’t know. Neither did Franky. Chopper might—she couldn’t really tell. Nami felt herself nearly touch it, nearly slide those missing pieces together, but she also wasn’t the one it was being hidden from.

She was there, when Zoro woke up. It was slow; a grimace forming unconsciously as his eyes slid open, and for one frozen second, he was afraid. Nami had never seen Zoro afraid before. The second stretched, hovered, and Zoro wasn’t afraid of death, Nami knew that damn well, but he was afraid of something and he had become more human to her on Thriller Bark.

The truth never revealed itself, whatever that truth might have been, and for every expression that Sanji, Brook, and Robin made in Zoro’s direction, he didn’t return it. Because he didn’t regret it, whatever he’d done.

But Nami remembered that brief, human fear as he woke up on the rubble of Thriller Bark and, even now as they got closer and closer to Wano, she wondered what he’d been afraid of.

Because that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? It was easy to make bold claims about apologizing and asking for help if you’d never be the one to have to make them. It was easy to scoff at running when you’d never had to run before. Nami was convinced Zoro had never had to ask anyone for anything, that he’d never felt that particular weakness.

Hadn’t he?

It was a strange, melancholy night. Nami desperately missed the other half of the crew—just seeing Luffy run towards her on Zou, she knew everything would be better. She hated that they’d had to split up again after being apart for so long—

Another memory, much more recent. Happier, too.

The enormous dumbass on Sabaody pretending to be Luffy—really, all of that was so much funnier in retrospect, that he’d just put on a hat and anyone had believed him—but then people did tend to underestimate Luffy himself, expecting someone bigger and taller and with a cruel laugh. Nami was just disappointed that the woman who was playing her had been so un-cute.

But the fake Luffy had bolstered, and Nami had been trying to decide if she should just get it over with and kick his ass, and then she’d heard Usopp’s voice for the first time in two years and everything was _perfect_.

How many times had she replayed their disappearances at Sabaody? How many times, as she trained herself to be smarter and stronger, did she replay her own mistakes? How many times, she wondered, did the others do the same?

“Well, Miss, would you like to drink with me instead?” Nothing short of joy.

Then, being back on Sunny, the ship rocking beneath her feet, her friends alive and whole and well and _safe_ , and they were inches from more infamy than Nami knew what to do with, but they’d all made it back as promised, just missing Sanji-kun, and the impossible swordsman, and her captain—

“Hey!!! Everyone!” Came the call from up above. There was nothing like Luffy’s smile; nothing could make her feel so utterly and completely at ease. Zoro by his side with Chopper perched on his shoulder, even Sanji-kun managing to look cool—

(For a few seconds anyway. Had his nose bled like that before?)

But they were _here,_ and they were together, and the Navy was stupid for even thinking they had the chance to stop them. Cannonballs? As if.

They celebrated and they _talked_ , about where they had traveled and who they had met, Usopp’s storytelling voice at its grandest, Luffy and Chopper shrieking and cheering like perfect audience members, Franky jumping up and going on with his ridiculous ‘improvements’, Brook jumping up with his equally ridiculous outfit and stories about life as a _rock star_ , Robin’s quiet laughs in the background (Nami caught her glance curiously at Luffy once, right before it faded back into a smile), Sanji’s adamant refusal to name any details about who he’d learned to run underwater from that made Nami all the more curious as to weasel it out of him.

Zoro had been sitting in the corner, staring at them all with one less eye than he’d had before, and someone had asked about it, but he’d just shrugged and said something about sometimes there needing to be a price paid. Nami imagined him tripping and falling onto one of his own swords.

But now, as Nami stared out at the sea approaching Wano, now she thought it was something else. In the end, Zoro had named the island he’d trained at. Kuraigana, which hadn’t meant anything to Nami at the time, but Robin’s bright blue eyes had widened slightly, before giving him the same curious look that she’d given Luffy.

How long had passed since then? Since they first descended into the depths below the Red Line, since they’d fought together for the first time in two years. It had all come back to them; each remembered their place in the geared machinery that was the Straw Hat Pirates, ebbing and flowing with every battle, every meal in the kitchen, every new island they’d come across, and every assignment of watch duty.

So, here Nami was, on watch duty, thinking entirely too much about something that really didn’t matter.

They were a pirate crew that very intentionally did not _care_ about who joined before who, titles like first mate, an exact hierarchal pecking order that determined who could give orders to who, the type that was actually necessary on larger ships, where massive crews needed to be coordinated. Nami herself gave far more orders than Luffy, but not where food or maintenance or medical aid were concerned, and it might not work for a larger ship, but a larger, nameless and faceless crew wouldn’t work well for any of them either.

Therefore, it didn’t matter that Nami and Zoro had been there from the beginning, three almost-pirates in a dinghy, before Jimbe and Brook and Franky and Robin and Chopper and Sanji and Usopp and Merry—

(Before Nami realized that this was it, this was what she was meant to be a part of, that these were the people who would save her and love her, and she would save and love them back over and over again).

Well, no, thought Nami, growing bitter again. It didn’t matter that _she_ had been there from the beginning. It only mattered that Zoro had. Because he’d never left.

Why was this _upsetting_ her so much?!

If Zoro were here, he would have laughed at her. She imagined how that conversation would go, ignoring that it would never happen because Zoro was wildly incompetent at communicating something as mundane as insecurities and emotional intelligence in general, and ignoring that what he would probably tell her would be something like “this is why you shouldn’t think too much.”

“It’s not that easy,” said Nami aloud, for the second time that night. It wasn’t easy to always be strong enough to solve problems on your own, to never have to ask for help, to never have to beg someone to do something for you, to never have the little worm of guilt that Luffy might be disappointed in you. To know, with unmatched certainty, that your place was by another’s side.

Except…

There was that frozen second that stretched too long on Thriller Bark, one second that said _fear_ instead of “Nothing Happened”, one second that wasn’t regret because it couldn’t be regret, and it wasn’t regret even afterwards with Sanji’s troubled glare and Robin’s serene knowing and Brook’s poorly-hidden awe.

Except, when Zoro had said the name Kuraigana as they sunk towards Fishman Island, he hadn’t been proud. But why wouldn’t he be? Even Sanji was proud of the skills he’d gained, despite refusing to name who he’d learned them from, and Luffy was so proud of all of _them_ , all claps and delighted laughs and gasps, and Nami just had to take a look at the gouged-out flesh on Luffy’s chest to know that she was never leaving him alone again.

And Zoro, the same Zoro who’d declared that he would become the world’s strongest swordsman to anyone who could hear him, didn’t seem proud that he’d clearly gotten stronger, just resigned to the fact that he did and happy to be home.

Except, what if the plea was quieter? Made without tearful screams to anyone who could hear it, without the entire world watching, without an ensuing battle, without…

Without Luffy.

But then, Luffy wouldn’t know.

And there was a secret, wasn’t there. One that sometimes solidified when Nami put her mind to it, connecting the fragmented pieces, but she’d never thought about it like _that_. And there was another secret, one that Nami hadn’t thought very much about at all, except hadn’t she just read something in the news that morning? There were so many islands, but how many had someone willing to train with a sword?

And how many had someone that Zoro would be willing to train under?

It was floating now, in front of her. Luffy would be upset, she thought. Didn’t Zoro know that? Of course he did, was Nami’s second thought, and that was why he would never tell. He would never tell, none of the others would ever tell, Luffy would never know (unless he did; Nami knew her captain’s eerie perceptiveness and complete dumbassery all too well), and Zoro would still be by his side, not having left but not honorable to a fault, either.

Nami wasn’t really sure if that was cowardly or brave. To never know Luffy’s disappointment was also to never know his intense and perfect forgiveness. But she did think that maybe, if the pieces she’d put together were true, that she might understand him a little better.

And, she thought, that Zoro would understand Sanji and Robin and Usopp (and her) a little better now, too. Despite it only being a one-sided conversation.

Zoro was the first, unwavering and loyal and demonically strong, the one out of all of them who occupied the same, strange wavelength as their captain. But maybe, if Zoro belonged next to Luffy in battle, then Nami was the one who belonged next to him everywhere else.

Because if Luffy wanted to charge into adventure, then Nami would be the one to part the tides to make it happen. If Luffy could overcome the impossible, then Nami could, too. He tested her patience, annoyed her to no-end, drove her up the wall half the time, but there was no one else as unstoppable on land or by sea.

Nami suddenly grinned. If there was anyone watching her, which there shouldn’t have been at this hour, they might have thought her slightly insane. And she was, in a way, for depressing herself with comparisons that seemed very pale considering that Luffy and Zoro in a boat together would absolutely still be in East Blue, two impossibly strong fighters who were also the worst sailors Nami had ever had the pleasure of meeting.

The order of joining still didn’t matter, she thought, as the horizon started to brighten a little. Soon, pink and orange and pale blue would bloom across the sky, and they would be another day closer to an enemy Nami was dreading to fight. But maybe being the one to find these two idiots in a dinghy and unlock the path forward meant something, too.

Nami smiled, leaned against Sunny, and thought that the waves might get a little choppy later on in the day, especially with that northwest wind, but at least it really was a beautiful dawn.

-

“Kuraigana?” It was over, finally, and Nami edged up next to Zoro in front of an enormous bonfire, flames sparking deep, russet orange and true gold. She was exhausted, but it wasn’t like exhaustion made her curiosity go away. And whether it mattered or not, she still wanted to know.

“What about it?” Zoro responded, taking a swing of his mug. Almost everyone else had passed out already, either from injuries or alcohol, and the two of them were more or less alone.

“Thought I read something about it in the newspaper. Isn’t one of the Shichibukai out there?”

Zoro shrugged, his open eye glancing over at her. “Maybe it’s Buggy the Clown.” 

That did make Nami laugh, despite herself. “Maybe.”

They stayed up against the other, alcohol warm in Nami’s stomach, the great fire very slowly shrinking as one after another every person fell. It had been a massive party, truly outstanding, especially because they were _finally_ all together, dancing and drinking and laughing as the night went on. How very much unlike the night Nami worried about her place, as if she didn’t know with every fiber of her being where her place was.

She was starting to drift, head finding a place on Zoro’s steady shoulder, when he spoke.

“Does it matter?”

“No,” said Nami, without having to think about it at all, and she felt Zoro’s breaths and heartbeat slow into a smooth, even rhythm of companionship that might have been waves.


End file.
